The National Institutes of
Health Roadmap for Medical Research calls for providing “the
necessary foundation for advancing basic and clinic research” to
speed promising therapies from the laboratory into patient
care. That is exactly the philosophy behind the new Phase
I Drug Development Program at the University of Miami
Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center.

“Some of these homegrown
agents are now in the preclinical stage, and we are actively
working on trying to move
them into patient care,” says hematologist-oncologist
Jaime Merchan, M.D., M.M.Sc., assistant professor of
clinical medicine at UM/Sylvester. “We are currently
working with a variety of novel agents and combinations,
some of them developed at our institution. Examples
of such agents currently being tested in the preclinical
setting include oncolytic viruses, which are viruses
that kill tumors, fusion antibodies that target angiogenesis,
and agents targeting tumor metabolism.”

These are not your father’s cancer-fighting strategies—and
that’s the whole idea behind the new center, which
teams physicians, scientists, pharmacist Aurea Flores,
Pharm.D., nurses, statis- ticians, research coordinators,
and technicians. It also creates a dedicated pharmacy,
lab space, and chemotherapy unit.

Phase I trials are the first
human tests of an experimental therapy. They’re designed to see if drugs are safe
and to set the proper dosage, but they can also yield
promising results.

“Phase I trials are
important steps to transition novel treatments from the
bench to the bedside,” says
Caio Max S. Rocha Lima, M.D., associate professor of
clinical medicine in the Division of Hematology/Oncology. “Having
a phase I center makes this possible.”

The program is the only academic
phase I testing center dedicated to drug development
for cancer patients in
South Florida. The phase I group is already conducting
clinical trials with novel agents to fight cancer.
That helps UM/Sylvester physicians and scientists establish
important collaborative relationships and offer patients
something even more important: more choices.

“This program is a
real part of what a comprehensive cancer center is all
about,” says W. Jarrard Goodwin,
M.D., F.A.C.S., director of UM/Sylvester. “It’s
going to be at the epicenter of helping us grow, helping
us thrive as a cancer center, and it will help set
us apart from everyone else in South Florida.”